Reculturing Museums takes a unified sociocultural theoretical approach to analyze the many conflicts museums experience in the 21st century. Embracing conflict, Ash asks: What can practitioners and researchers do to create the change they want to see when old systems remain stubbornly in place? Using a unified sociocultural, cultural-historical, activity-theoretical approach to analyzing historically bound conflicts that plague museums, each chapter is organized around a central contradiction, including finances ("Who will pay for museums?"), demographic shifts ("Who will come to museums?"), the roles of narratives ("Whose story is it?"), ownership of objects ("Who owns the artifact?"), and learning and teaching ("What is learning and how can we teach equitably?"). The reculturing stance taken by Ash promotes social justice and equity, 'making change' first, within museums, called inreach, rather than outside the museum, called outreach; challenges existing norms; is sensitive to neoliberal and deficit ideologies; and pays attention to the structure agency dialectic. Reculturing Museums will be essential reading for academics, students, museum practitioners, educational researchers, and others who care about museums and want to ensure that all people have equal access to the activities, objects, and ideas residing in them.

Artistic activism has been explored extensively by both political theorists and art historians over the last decade. This renewed interest in artistic activism can be justified by the recent wave of boycotts, petitions, strikes, and direct actions targeting museums in a global context. Such interventions aim at holding museums and institutions accountable not only to their own mission statements, but also to the communities they claim to serve. At the same time, they allude to a broader crisis of legitimacy that major museums are faced with today. In this respect, this paper examines a series of activist interventions spearheaded by the action-oriented movement Decolonize This Place that were deployed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2019, culminating in the resignation of the Vice-Chairman of its Board of Trustees. It will argue that museums and institutions are permeated by inner divisions and conflicting interests, hence are ideal sites to stage antagonisms. It will show that the activist performative interventions discussed here used institutions as gateways to broader ideological struggles that exceeded the artistic realm and were crucial in activating the antagonisms that remained dormant within the institution, in mapping connections between seemingly disparate struggles, and building broader decolonial solidarities.

All of those persons and institutions that have been involved in situations of violence, conflict or civil unrest, know perfectly that there comes a time when we, as museum workers, have to make difficult choices to control and shape the situation that we are immersed into. How should we, as cultural institutions, react to conflict in our communities? Which is our role towards our audiences? This paper reviews the case scenario that we lived in our museum, in hope that the achievements and mistakes we made in our way, could shine some light on the difficult role museums have when faced with a difficult situation.

By means of a case study, this article presents the need to develop a contextual museology that allows models of museum management to be adapted in times of transition or crisis. It also defends the need to implement knowledge-management processes that advocate systematising and documenting the memory of museum entities, which can in turn serve as a foundation for planning museum practices amid crises. Despite the challenges caused by its involuntary closure, for Colombia’s Centro de Museos de la Universidad de Caldas (Museum Centre at the University of Caldas) the pandemic became the ideal setting to carry out, behind closed doors, an assessment of 25 years of continuous work. What should be done with a closed museum? The institutional response was to begin an internal evaluation process to re-imagine the museum in a future era of post-pandemic work. The Centro de Museos therefore developed a new museum plan, financed by a grant from the Colombian government's Ministry of Culture. Turning to online modes of working posed a challenge on the implementation of participatory methodologies that were used at different organisational levels, such as the creation of collaborative murals, interviews and online discussions. These exercises made it possible to integrate different perspectives and visions of the museum and to recover lost memories that contributed to a new conceptualisation of the university museum.

Because of the power museums are capable of exercising, it is appropriate and necessary that we have f ights about what is presented there. Museums are, af ter all, where the national narrative is blocked out and staged and where our sense of the world is inf ormed, if not shaped. “Perhaps,” Susan Crane writes, “we can also enjoy museums which confound and confabulate.” Perhaps, but the relationship between museums and their audiences has proved f ar more dif f icult to renegotiate than we thought. We have learned to our regret that there is a torrent of rage and tears waiting to break through the fragile membrane of civility at any time. Still, while for many museum professionals Mining the Museum has been a path not taken, f or others, its rewards have transcended its attendant difficulties and risks. We are still aspiring to decipher what his methods reveal about our medium and its largely unrealized potential. It appears that for visitors as well as prof essionals museums can and should act as interlocutors between the past and the present, between ourselves and the other—and that we should be ready to take the consequences of doing so. Af ter all, through our portals pass large numbers of people of diverse backgrounds and conditions and interests and learning styles. Their lives are in the process of changing, whether they know it or not; they are in the constant process of learning, whether they know it or not. Museums can, if we choose, assist in these metamorphoses by opening unseen windows on cloaked realities. Or we can retard them. Museum people, some of them at least, are thinking long and hard about who we are supposed to be in this moment. Some at least have concluded we have the right and the duty to choose which role to play in this unf olding, epic drama.